Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to systems and methods for collecting, analyzing, transmitting, and acting on information collected from instruments monitoring and controlling equipment used for fluid hydrocarbon (principally natural gas) well production including collection platforms, pipeline insertion platforms, and the like.
Background Information
Where natural gas and other fluid hydrocarbons are found in the earth, producers may drill multiple bore holes (wells) in the earth to capture the hydrocarbon products. Producers often aggregate the output from individual wells by routing pipes from nearby individual wells to a common location for connection to a distribution pipeline. The collection of valves, gauges, pumps, filters, and other equipment at the common location are often attached to a rectangular metal structure. The structure, with the attached equipment, is sometimes referred to as a “platform” or “skid.” Another aggregation of fluid hydrocarbon production equipment is a pipeline insertion platform. In this application, the term “skid” is meant to refer to a wide variety of equipment aggregations for fluid hydrocarbon production, conveyance and/or storage, whenever hydrocarbon conditions are being monitored by multiple instruments on a common structure, including a collection platform, a pipeline insertion platform, and the like.
Typically, producers monitor and control several different characteristics of production including pipeline pressure, instantaneous flow rate, accumulated flow, etc., and control pressures and flows to meet business and safety needs. In current practices, producers often use discrete analog pressure gauges, analog flow meters, and digital flow meters to display key information. Many of these discrete instruments lack any wireless communication or telemetry capability. Without such telemetry, a person monitoring the instruments typically has to visually inspect—i.e., “read”—each instrument's display to determine the state of the condition the instrument is monitoring—to get a “reading.” To make the data readings available for others' uses, the person then records each instrument's reading, often by handwriting multiple instruments' readings on a paper form. Subsequently, a data entry person may transfer the handwritten information from the paper report into a computer database.